


Inked

by apiphile



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen, Tattoos, a present for my lovely sister, ariadne is snarky, eames is chubby, holy crap I put a real person I know in this argh, non-specific locales
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-11
Updated: 2010-09-11
Packaged: 2017-10-12 00:16:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is absolutely no point in trying to hide anything from Eames.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inked

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mill](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Mill).



The afternoon light is as thick and syrupy as the contents of a hive, buzzing only with the distant voices on someone else's radio, and Eames is stretched across the end of his bed like a housecat with a bad back and a worse hangover. The curtains do not stir their lazy cotton selves to admit whatever breeze is skulking around outside, and the air-conditioning is far too feeble to make any headway against the sweat glands of an overweight Englishman.

He's awoken from the state of near-slumber - or at least, perspiration-heavy, weeping-bank-account stupor - by the incessant shrilling of a mobile phone which has been set (assuredly not by his own bloody hand, unless he's been drinking sambucca again) to _Livin' La Vida Loca_. Eames does not waste time on blinking and groaning, but slips his hand into a hip pocket that never used to be this tight, and snorts when he gets the name in focus.

"You miss me already? I thought you said I poisoned the very air around me," Eames sighs, answering the call.

"I asked you to put your cigar out," Ariadne corrects. "I need some advice."

"Coathangers hurt less if you drink a bottle of gin first," he says, lazy as the afternoon and groping around under the mattress for his wallet. "Or go to England and they'll give you one for free." He drops the strip of leather on his once-flat stomach with a slap. "Don't worry, I won't tell anyone."

" _Eames_ ," she says, impatient as always, sharp as a slap. "Stop it."

"As long as you promise you are taking all the relevant precautions, petal," Eames says, heaving himself off the bed and feeling around with his feet for his absent shoes.

"You're not my father."

"That would make our working relationship so much more interesting," Eames sighs, spotting one of the worn brown loafers poking out of the en suite like the nose of a guilty dog. He considers slapping his thigh and calling the thing to _heel_.

"I just need the name of a good tattooist," she says, quieter than he'd expected. He wonders if she's with her parents, if this is the reason for the clandestine nature of the call, and realises he has no earthly clue who the (undoubtedly beautiful) Mr and Mrs Ariadne's-Parents are, where they live, or how they came by a daughter that must surely be the envy of the town.

"Location, oh my dear little Daedalus." He presses the phone against his head with his shoulder, and wrestles the only shoe within reach onto his foot. "They do have physical presences, you know."

"I _can_ travel."

"Ah yes, the funds from our beloved Saito-sama," Eames mumbles, shuffling across the tiled floor to his remaining shoe. "I'd forgotten this novel habit of _holding on_ to money."

" _Matthew_ ," Ariadne hisses, and there is very much a soupcon of the oppressed-by-the-parental in her voice. Eames cannot help but snicker at the transformation; the calm and capable, the quintessential mistress of the maze, the lady of the labyrinth, suddenly stripped of all her cunning, stunning skills and reduced to a whispering angel.

He throws a pylon in the path of this train of thought, lest his own less-beloved progenitors rear their carefully-abraded memory-heads; he also throws himself back at his wallet and rifles through the contents with a practiced pair of forefingers.

"Sorry, distracted by the bevy of beautiful naked women dancing at the foot of my bed. The one I use is in Greenwich." He drops to an uncomfortable crouch to peer around the curtains; the sunlight outside remains blinding and whiter than the bones of deserters. "Which is in London." He shoves his wallet back into his pocket and examines his hair in the mirror by the room's door; it seems to have _set_. "Which is in England."

"You're seeing too much of him," Ariadne says almost sweetly, "the pedantry is rubbing off on you."

"- that's not the only thing that -"

"I don't want to know." Her interruption rings in his ears like an echo of the door as it closes behind him. "I've _seen_ your tattoos, I'll be going somewhere else."

Eames stretches his face with his free hand, pops his neck, and saunters more slowly than his gut instinct would like him to toward the back stairs, the ones the staff typically take. It is sleepy o'clock, and the place is as dead as the part of his conscience that should object to what he is doing. "Such a contrary child -"

"- I'm _twenty-three._ "

"Child," he reiterates, taking the steps as silently as he can in these creaking shoes on these creaking wooden boards. He lowers his voice, the damp acoustics of a plastered cupboard of a staircase throwing back every syllable into his straining ears. "You know they're of _quality_ even if you dispute the taste."

"They're of _a_ quality," Ariadne corrects. "Will you give me the name of this place - why are you whispering?"

"I'm committing fraud," Eames says with great dignity, as he rounds the next corner of the tiny spiral and suppresses the premonition that the staircase will eventually become too tiny for his increased bulk, leaving him trapped. "Why are _you_?"

"My mother doesn't always approve of me talking to men who commit fraud," she says under her breath. "The name."

"What are you going to get?" Eames pushes the outside door open as carefully as he can, and steps down onto the red dust of the road. "A pretty butterfly on your ankle?"

Ariadne calls him a very bad word. "It's none of your business. Give me the name."

"Well, you _could_ just stop in every tattooist in Greenwich and ask where Mr Eames acquires his excellent ink," he says, hailing a taxi, flashing an armpit full of sweat at a disgusted tourist woman with the same ease as his insincere smile. "Or you could tell me what you intend to brand on yourself."

"I can't, if you approve of it I'll have to change my mind," she murmurs. The taxi door opens and, after a careful inspection of the expectant face of its driver, Eames squeaks and grunts awkwardly onto the worn non-leather of the back seat.

"But dearest diminutive Daedalina, if I don't approve of it I won't sign your permission slip," Eames coos, leaning back on the seat. He points at the roadsign ahead and nods at the driver, who scowls until Eames waves a note in his face. "And there will be no tattoo for your delicately-turned ankle."

If she were here she would almost certainly have stamped on his foot by now, or subjected him to one of those perilously intense stairs that make him feel as if the top layer of his skin is being stripped away. But she is thousands of miles away, crackling and distorted by the earth's magnetic field and the shield of family love that clearly encloses her home; Eames transfers the phone to the other side of his head.

"Matthew, please stop it and just tell me the name of the place," Ariadne says, quiet as a mouse and as firm as the world beneath the wheels of the car; the _joke is over now_ is so clear that it is almost flashing in neon in front of his eyes.

He exhales, long and slow, and gives her the name.

* * *

"Alright," says an unmistakeably North London voice, travelling down the stairs ahead of its owner like a herald or a bad smell, depending on how fond one was of said owner. "It's not going to take half an hour, but the minimum spend is fifty quid either way. You alright with that? You don't have anything else you want doing at the same time?"

"No," Ariadne's voice wraps itself around the edge of the door to the basement like honey and smoke. "This is all I want. I don't mind the price."

"Okay," the first voice comes down a flight of stairs, "is this your first one?"

Eames half-registers her answer, lounging on the guest-chair as if he's been there for a month, watching the languid movements of a drowsy black tarantula in her glass-fronted tank, to his right. There are pictures of intricate, macarbre fantasy creatures, drawn in pencil and biro, sellotaped to the white walls; opposite where he sits is a huge mirror, and a handful of wood carvings which have their origins, he thinks, in Alaska.

The first head to show is that of his tattoist; piled with corkscrews of dark brown hair that is in sore need of a trim, blessed with exceptionally beautiful sleepy green eyes and ordered features, adorned with an incongruous nose-ring. He says, back over his shoulder, "Just make yourself comfortable on the thing, I've got to sort things out down -- didn't see you come in."

"Sorry," Eames says, with a half-wave. "I was waiting for my daughter here. Chris said I might as well come down here."

He hears Ariadne's _argh_ of subliminated frustration before he sees her enter behind the delightful Mr Issah. "I was going to _show_ you anyway."

"You might never have made it back in one piece," Eames says, shifting his weight on the chair - it is ever so slightly too narrow for his hips, clearly designed for use by only the scrawniest of cycle couriers and anorexic models. "And with a new tattoo, how on earth would any of us have identified your poor dead self?"

"You never said you had a kid," says the excellent Mr Issah, spraying the work surfaces with alcohol.

"I'm not his -"

"She's not really -"

"I can _tell_ ," the tattooist interrupts, swiping away the alcohol with kitchen towel. "You're not _that_ old."

"So, what is it?" Eames leans forward in the chair, and part of the chair tugs greedily on his suit. "I'm piqued. You win. What could possibly have appealed so much to our tiny temptress of the twisting passages so much she's willing to score it into her skin forever?"

"Mate," says Biko, wiping something out of the line of Eames's sight, "you don't half talk a lot of shit. I mean, you're a great customer and your pain threshold is, you know, it's fucking there. But you chat a lot of shit."

Ariadne rolls her eyes and rolls up her t-shirt until the twin, moon-white peaks of her wave-crest scapulae are almost glowing under the halogen lights.

"Don't I at least get a clue?" Eames asks, chasing a stray hair from his forehead and locking it back among the rest of the product-imprisoned strands.

"I thought it was more fun when people made it hard for you," Ariadne says, and to Eames's slight irritation she completely sidesteps the potential for innuendo as if it didn't exist at all.

"It's a maze," he says, abruptly bored. "It's an unsolveable maze. With your totem at the centre."

She throws him an ugly glare, which melts away into a blank look at the experimental first buzz of the tattoo iron; Eames knits his fingers together over his stomach and leans back on the chair until a threatening squeak from the backrest tells him it's not as firmly-attached as it ought to be.

"By the way," he says, watching her mouth slacken and shrink, "if you hold my hand, I won't tell any of the others."

She gives him the finger.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Biko Issah is my tattooist, that is his studio in the fic. Writing someone I *know* in a story is legitimately the most frightening fictional thing I have ever done. ARGH I AM CONVINCED I WROTE HIM OOC and then I realised NO ONE ELSE KNOWS WHAT THAT CONSTITUTES. Hrm.


End file.
